Ahem. The below is off the top of my head and in some cases it’s been months since I watched the show in question. 

Extraordinary You
[Pretending I’m not aware of your opinion of Rowoon. 😈 ]
Cosmos: I think this show attempts A LOT and it doesn’t succeed at everything, including crucially the mechanics of its manwha-based world or a consistent through-line on what determines the fate/allows defiance-of-fate of its characters, but what it does do is fascinating and gorgeous. Predestination vs. self-determination? Authorial direction vs. autonomous evolution of characters? Bring it on! Explore it at length, with charismatic kids and dazzling visual effects and think-piece dialogue. And then frustrate me by not being able, within the bounds of conventional kdrama, to resolve a dozen interesting questions. The poorly-CGI’d intercosmic portal between the manwha and real(?) worlds is representative of this show’s ambitions and ultimate inability to deliver. In the meantime, there is SO MUCH to look at and think about. It probably helped me a lot (and was kind of cheating) that I had the DB and Bitches Over Dramas (I know, I know) discussions while I was watching, but those also likely biased my assessment.

Goddamn, this just skyrocketed into my top five for sheer thought-provokingness. 😅

Cast: LJW’s can’t-look-away performance as an asshole struggling to grasp that he’s just written that way is the second-best part of the show for me. I kept expecting to be annoyed by Kim Hye-yoon’s bounciness, and then her purity and joie de vivre and sheer grit won my cynical heart. Controversial opinion: Rowoon’s beauty and his very ~blankness~ serves his manwha-come-to-life character well, and one of the pleasures of the show for me is watching his pretty face closely for the moments when the character becomes self-aware: the unobtrusive glimmer of attention he suddenly shows, a hint in his body language that his stillness is intentional and not merely unconscious. Does he do that perfectly? No, but well enough. All of the actors except Kim Hye-yoon were babies anyway. This show does not add up to the sum of its parts but the parts are so freaking fascinating that for me it makes it worth the watch anyway. (W but in high school, I see you.) And this from someone deeply averse to high school stories.

Color: I loved the tone shift from on-stage to off-stage. Did I mention that it’s abso-fucking-lutely GORGEOUS? I’m no artist, but I am a craftswoman and this pushes every aesthetic button I have. The flowers and the manwha scenes are like tapestries. The English, French, and Korean book titles on the library shelves made me spend so much time on pause, greedily sucking up words and the stories behind the spines. The sunlight through stained-glass windows is the light I have tried to capture in photos or sketches in every dim Romanesque chapel ever.

EY cont’d
I found the ending appropriately uncertain but also very unsatisfying. They’re only together until the next time the writer notices them or ends the story? There really is no way to break free of the manwha? Then tell me why you bother to try! Explore that!

This show makes me struggle more with Concept vs. Execution than any other, and you’ll have figured out by now that you and I are Not The Same on how much weight we give to each. I gloss over the draggy repetitive mid-episode plottiness and the inadequately explored trope-poking by secondary characters because I am entranced by everything this is and wanted to be.


Sunbae Don’t Put on Your Lipstick
I wanted to smack everyone by the end. Kindly refer to my Rant: On Kissing.
And to my mini-rant on centering a drama on Perfect Boyfriend. I gave this a B at the time, but in hindsight it’s sunk to C at best because no doubt there are many much worse dramas but I avoided those, unlike this mush. Also, viewer is clearly supposed to like side couple (sister and director), but I find them annoying as fuck. Also, I am VERY TIRED of rich people. This (and drunk scenes) may be my insurmountable problem in kdramas. 


I Will Go To You When the Weather is Nice
I kept wondering:
Did Philip Larkin write this drama? (They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do.)
Do people in SK really go to jail for each other?
I’ve said this elsewhere but:
(a) I watched Are You Human Too? and this show in close succession and it’s easy to distinguish when Seo Kang-joon is a robot and when he is a Real Boy because the robot smiles more.
(b) I dislike PMY’s character and that sours a lot of the drama for me. I’m kinda done with her.
(c) LJW is so freaking adorkable no matter what he does. Everyone in this drama should have just been scuttling ahead of him strewing flowers in his path.
(d) Despite my dissatisfaction, this show lands some of its themes better than 90% of the dramas I saw in My Year One of Dramas Ever, vis.: flawed people are flawed, but can learn to cope and to help each other. Snow is not as romantic 
as it looks. Bookstores are the beating heart of the community. Take your pharmacist’s advice. (Missing in this list: LOVE IS NO SUBSTITUTE FOR THERAPY, but I may die of superannuation before a kdrama admits that.) 


Tomorrow
I seriously just watched for the pretty and the scenery-chewing and it delivered on those counts. Nearly complete suspension of judgement was required and it had several moments that unsuspended my suspension. I have no expectations about dramas handling mental health, suicide, or any related issue well and it’s no worse than many on that count. Some storylines I found truly moving, some were dumb, and then there was the military/nationalistic propaganda to which I as a wartime military brat am immune, so my reaction to that was eye-rolls, not tears. I colored my hair pink after I watched. There’s a deep bucket of dramas that I enjoyed while they were running, am not sorry I watched, and will never revisit (except maybe for pink hair). This is in that bucket. You’d probably hate it. 

Move to Heaven
I can’t deliver much of an opinion because I only watched the episodes with LJW and there aren’t many since he is a doomed character who spends most of his scenes in a coma, embodying a psychic wound for the protagonist. I hate boxing with a passion (I used to love watching it when I was young and then realized it is the only major traditional sport where the object is to injure your opponent, and that was it for me). LJW is heartbreaking in the bits where he’s alive/conscious; I don’t even remember the other actors/characters. I can’t disentangle the hateful, horrible illicit boxing matches from the drama itself. Wow, that was a lot of words for a drama on which I have no opinion. 


A Piece of Your Mind: more later, possibly.
Chief Kim and Goblin: THOUGHTS. More later.

Sunbae mini-rant (copied):
I binged She Would Never Know this week, too, and found it … meh. It started better than I expected and the tension with the two-timing boss felt pretty real, but once the OTP romance really got going and Rowoon turned into an improbably perfect boyfriend, it started to go flat. The business with the FL trying to woo the ML near the end was childish and cringey. I’ve already ranted on my fanwall about the kissing – although admittedly the last kiss showed improvement. Overall: B.

And now it’s my turn to take several days to reply! haha
And I wont be able to respond to everything but I enjoyed reading your thoughts anyway.

So what you’re telling me is that you went and watched everything with Lee Jae Wook in it because of Lee Jae Wook… *teehee*
However, you missed Memories of the Alhambra, s o tsk tsk, not good enough 😂😂 Jk jk.
Although now I want to see you watch MOA. Partly because I want to see what you’d think of it since it’s by the same writer as W: Two Worlds, and partly so you can read my shitposts (the OG of all shitposts) alongside watching it so I can get a live time reaction to both because that would be hilarious.

“[Pretending I’m not aware of your opinion of Rowoon. 😈 ]” Hey I didn’t watnt to punch him back then, remember… 🤭🤭
I think your comment about Concept v Execution is interesting. If you stalked the recaps then you probably happened upon my comment on this show early on about satire, and becoming the thing it satirizes. Not sure if you remember that.
Execution IS very important for me, you are right 😂 because I just can’t sink my teeth into a concept that is delivered badly! (On the other hand, my issues with EY surpass execution alone heh)
Sunbae- I wanted to smack everyone in it too. But for the entire ride and not just by the end lmao

“Missing in this list: LOVE IS NO SUBSTITUTE FOR THERAPY”– okay well NOW I need to plug my IFWYTWIN essay lol: https://www.dramabeans.com/members/sicarius/activity/1034649/

Thank you for sharing, once again! x